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Why Stefan Molyneux is Wrong about Libertarians

In his breaking up video, Stefan Molyneux charges that a high IQ is necessary for a libertarian society to exist, and because libertarians believe that reason and evidence are how we convince people to transition to a libertarian society that libertarians are therefore inconsistent for considering a racial discussion of IQ differences to be entirely irrelevant to libertarianism. (Which it is.)

This is possibly the dumbest thing I’ve heard him say yet (and yes, that is not an argument; that’s a reaction to his argument.)

He casts the situation in binary form, saying ‘you either force people to change or you convince them to change,’ and suggests libertarians have chosen the latter, peaceful means of change.

But within the latter, he casts a high IQ population as necessary because only people with high IQ are able to understand ‘what is seen and what is unseen,’ ie: an allusion to Bastiat and the economic concepts that underlie how society works in order for people to vote intelligently, possibly also an allusion to Sowell’s concept of ‘thinking beyond stage one’ to multiple consequences down the line. While this is necessary for economic analysis, it ignores a lot.

This also ignores that within the realm of peaceful means of transition are a lot more strategies than ‘convincing people based on reason and evidence’ by something like argumentation to vote the right way(!), and also ignores that a high-IQ might even make people more stubborn in their beliefs and less willing to change rather than less stubborn, and more susceptible to certain cognitive biases rather than less susceptible.

In fact, one could argue the entire alt-right’s line on IQ is one giant product of a known high-IQ bias called illusory-superiority and the bias-blind spot. And there is a wealth of info on the fact that a high-IQ does not in fact eliminate susceptibility to biases of all manner, and can actually increase susceptibility to many (1, 2, 3). High-IQ is no guard or prevention against the kinds of cognitive-bias that prevent people from changing their minds:

“In one study, subjects read about a controversial issue, such as whether or not people should be allowed to sell their own organs. Then, they wrote their thoughts about it. The researchers found the typical cognitive bias. People mostly wrote arguments favoring their own position. They did not tend to integrate arguments across different perspectives, which would indicate critical thinking.

“The researchers also assessed intelligence. They found that people who scored more highly on the intelligence test showed just as much of the cognitive bias as the rest. They found no link between intelligence and cognitive bias.” (src)

In fact, people have studied what causes others to change their political beliefs, and Molyneux ignores this entirely–or more likely is ignorant of it in the first place.

This man is probably a socialist, mainly because his entire social-circle is too. Most professors are.

What’s even sadder is that IQ has zero effect on your ability to be swayed by politically-biased statements. Those who favor Trump may simply be falling prey to a cognitive-bias for one-sided positions, which Trump has mastered speaking in terms of:

“In a second study, subjects evaluated arguments, rather than writing them out. They were again shown controversial issues, such as abortion and lowering the drinking age. For each issue, the researchers had put together short position papers. Some of these positions were one-sided. For example, all of the arguments would be for lowering the drinking age, or all would be against. Others integrated the different perspectives, and were completely balanced.

“One interesting finding was that people preferred the one-sided positions regardless of the direction. They didn’t like the more integrated perspectives. The researchers also did find the strong cognitive bias in favor of the person’s own side. Finally, neither of the previous findings was related to intelligence. People with high IQ reasoned just like everyone else.” (src)

So how do people gain or change their beliefs in the first place? Quite simply, the biggest factor in what you believe is what others around you believe. We live in a society of groupthink and status-quo bias first of all, and these are the biggest factors in what we believe and why.

How do people come to believe things in the first place? By being born into X place or culture, from which they absorb the opinions and culture of the society they grew up in, ex nihilo. The young mind is an empty sponge–the state knows this, that’s why they made schooling compulsory and control what children are taught. That is the most powerful way to inculcate people with beliefs, control what they are taught by society as they grow up.

On this basis we have entire populations that grow up in many disparate belief systems: Hindu, Muslim, Christian, atheist, and yes, left and right as well. Most will lean left or right politically according to how the family they grew up in leans. Attitudes are infectious. It is not an accident that entire families tends to lean one way politically, it’s an absorbed political bias, obtained by osmosis through cultural absorption through the family micro-culture.

All of this has zero, zilch, nada to do with IQ. You can be stupid or smart, but where you grow up and what family you’re raised in will have a far, far bigger impact on what you believe politically than any other factor, including IQ.

This man was also a socialist. Mainly because everyone he knew was also.

So, if Molyneux were *actually consistent* in his attack on libertarians and libertarianism, with his statement in that video that libertarians do not live out their ideals via facts and evidence, he would have to conclude that the best way to obtain a libertarian world long-term is in fact not to side with republicans, close the borders, vote for Trump, etc., but rather to figure out how libertarians can start using status-quo bias and osmotic absorption of political norms to create more libertarians just like the state uses this phenomena to create implicit-statists.

Winning elections is not going to have any effect on the long-term political scene. That ship has already sailed. Cut your emotional ties to the US and think a bit more globally and a bit less short-term. If we could push a button that would save the world but lose the US, would you push that button? I would. If you would not do the same, you don’t really value liberty as your highest political ideal. The US federal government must at some point fail for a new political system to take its place anyway, arguing that open borders doesn’t work with generous welfare is useless precisely because it will move towards political dysfunction in the US, which moves the world closer to a post-democracy USA.

If Molyneux really wanted to start changing minds, and acknowledged that absorption of political norms from the youngest age and from those around us really was the number one factor that determines the political direction of a society, then he could only possibly support one thing: enclavism. Enclavism is the only peaceful, NAP-respecting way that libertarians can, right now, start building a libertarian society.

Seasteading is one option for creating a libertarian society; sure it costs money and will take work. Let’s get started.

We can therefore, on this basis, sketch out a very simple plan for changing the whole world. What we must do is create a libertarian enclave outside the existing political system, such as through seasteading or the like, and build a functioning society using our political norms, much in the way that Hong Kong succeeded dramatically and had its model imported throughout China, replacing their old and failing communistic model (and political change will follow in time there as well).

If we are correct that our political and economic norms will produce a very wealthy society, and we have good reason to think so, then a libertarian enclave should be very successful economically.

Since it will be majority-libertarian and using libertarian norms for both politics and economics, meaning decentralized law structures plus a free market economy, using this group-suasion effect of status-quo bias and absorption of political attitudes from those around us, anyone who lives in or grows up in a libertarian society will tend towards accepting libertarian political norms. High IQ or not, they will become implicit libertarians, and will likely view the concept of a monopoly state run by voting with horror and disbelief. And any children born in that society will tend towards becoming libertarians as well, simply by osmosis.

Molyneux should concede, since it is an obvious fact, that most people are not politically-learned and never will become so. So again, this idea that you need a high-IQ population–probably 80% of the world is simply uninterested in politics and political theory, and any strategy for world change that requires every person to become a political theory junky is a non-starter. High-IQ or not, you cannot make every person value political and economic theory enough to become theory-junkies enough to work their way through libertarian books and spend that 6 months realizing the advantages enough to become an intellectual libertarian. Won’t happen. Pure utopianism. Just like any concept of voting out the state–won’t happen, waste of time and money.

It’s not going to happen. This makes Molyneux doubly-wrong, even a high-IQ population is not going to spend the time to learn about libertarianism enough to vote libertarian. And we know this because most people who have high IQs in the world today still aren’t libertarians. If they were, he would have an actual point. But they aren’t. So some other factor besides IQ must–MUST be the key factor in what makes a society turn out the way it does.

The secret of the state is that it controls what we know, the premises we accept about the world and our place in it, and by doing so it controls what we conclude. The State controls schooling and by this means propagandizes the vast majority of citizens into the political norms of statism. High schools graduate millions of implicit–not principled–statists by the millions every year. The key to world change is to begin making that osmotic effect work for us instead of against us.

Lastly, this works twice, because if we can put in place a set of policies in our own society and produce results X that the world finds desirable, then guess what happens? People don’t need to see what is ‘seen and what is unseen,’ they don’t need to know why that society works any more than they need to know the details of binary math in order to use a cellphone.

All people need to do is identify that a certain place is achieving result X and that they want result X also, so why don’t we try instituting the same political system that this libertarian region is using and then maybe *we too can get result X*. That is, we can outcompete the state.

This is exactly how Europe abandoned monarchy and adopted democracy after the US showed it viable.

And this is exactly how the British government abandoned all their rules and regulations surrounding British shipping in the 1850’s, because they saw that unregulated American shipping was beating them to every port and getting the best goods, and so they made their government change to the American system because they wanted those results, because they were being outcompeted and the result was the British trade empire for the next 100 years.

Clipper ships dominated trade in the 19th century, but US shipping policies were eventually adopted by Britain, leading to the British trade empire

And this is also how we defeated the USSR in the cold war, by producing results that they wanted, because when Boris Yelstin came to the US, he believed he was being shown a fake version of the US, believed the US was doing to them what they did to their visitors, which is setting everything up as a Potemkin village. Making the country look more prosperous than it really was to psych out the Russians.

But on Yeltsin’s visit to Texas, he made a random stop at a random US grocery store, because he wanted to see how the US people actually lived. He walked into a Randall’s supermarket and was blown away, saying that this event caused him to finally doubt the viability of socialist economic policy, saying that even the richest of the rich and party members in Russia did not have anything like access to this kind of food and goods selection.

Yeltsin was never convinced by what anyone said, and Yeltsin undoubtedly had a high IQ, he was only convinced by seeing results that he wanted to experience himself. And it doesn’t take a high IQ to know you’d rather have more access to goods than less.

Actual photo of Yelstin touring the Randall’s supermarket which he later wrote in his autobiography was instrumental in his questioning of socialism.

Molyneux’s entire argument about IQ is a strategy that betrays him as emotionally-dependent on the idea of ‘saving the USA,’ as a sort of ‘nationalist-white-knight’ for the USA. He betrays himself as a political opportunist, grasping for some small victory that he feels is slowly slipping away.

This is nothing unusual, political opportunism is the great temptation of old men, for those who lose hope and grasp for any small desperate victory they can get, some way to turn the tide. Rothbard himself succumbed to it in his later days, tarnishing his reputation by partnering with anyone that would partner with him, even the racists of his day.

But Rothbard also taught libertarians in general our greatest political lesson: that we are not going to change the world via popular support and elections, that we are not going to change the world through party politics, that is a mirage. More radical means are needed. He taught us this by pushing hard on that exact strategy his whole life and utterly failing to produce change.

Anyone who becomes a politician becomes subject to the same incentives and pressures that all politicians face, and not one in a million can withstand that pressure and remain uncorrupted to the end.

Ron Paul will forever stand as an exception to that rule, a monument of stalwart libertarian idealism. All others have fallen away, men like Dana Rohrbacher, once a radical right-anarchist who was elected to congress and today is so slotted into the republican-machine that no one even remembers he was elected with libertarian backing.

Do you want to change the world towards libertarian ideals? Then stop trying to save the US necessarily and start thinking about how we can get our own independent libertarian political region via some form of enclavism. Until that happens, all we have are good arguments. After it happens, we have results to cite.

In fact if the US federal government were to get so bad that it became dysfunctional and broke down, that could even result in the states breaking into independent regions, and libertarians could surely carve an independent political region for themselves out of that. US political dysfunction is not inherently a negative from a libertarian point of view.

We must get a politically-independent region of our own in order to show the world what results a libertarian society would produce, and to begin producing implicit libertarians using the same osmotic and status-quo-induced means that the state today uses to pump out millions of implicit-statists every year. And those who want job opportunities, higher wages, and more freedom–that is, the entire world–will look to us for how to move the world forward, will leave their states and move to our regions, or will tear down their states because we have lead the way to show the world a system that works much better: a libertarian society.

That is our best way to change the world. Focusing on IQ is stupid. Knock it off.

I absolutely agree with the author that the IQ does not matter much (afraid to say “at all”). An example is Switzerland. Very few people there have a higher education. They simply do not need one to be successful and therefore do not pursue it. Still, they are one of the richest nations on earth.

I recommend the following book:
The Righteous Mind
Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
Jonathan Haidt

It is interesting that I found this book listed on an anti-libertarian web-site.

About: “What we must do is create a libertarian enclave outside the existing political system, such as through seasteading or the like, and build a functioning society using our political norms, much in the way that Hong Kong succeeded dramatically…..”

The above is good idea but not practical in my opinion. The reason is the following: Such a society will have a meager chance of success. Not because it will not be successful if left to itself, but because it will never be left to itself. If it starts becoming more successful than the ones around it it will be attacked and subdued before it has had the chance to become strong enough to oppose its enemies. What one needs is a critical mass of people who have libertarian values and then one need not organize a libertarian society artificially. It will organize itself by itself. However this critical mass is missing and there is no chance that it will materialize in the near future.

Some time ago I read Rick Rule’s idea (here in Liberty.me) about buying land and organizing a libertarian society there. He intended to sell rights to live on his land. Basically, what he wanted was to create a rich-man’s club expecting that it would somehow become a society. I would simply agree that he could do the latter. No country would object much if some rich people organize a paradise place for themselves. However as long as they do not start producing! Once they do, they become competitors , a threat and a valuable pray at the same time. Then they will be attacked and because they will have no allies,no popular support and no industrial power they will just vanish.
I believe that societies change because people’s ideas change. One can not simply out-compete the entire globe. The earth’s population will simply not allow it.

@yninov
Agreed with many of Mr. Ninov’s points concerning my schemes and dreams. Note that I’m not attempting to dramatically improve the world, merely looking to improve the lot of my family, my friends and my clients. My efforts supporting propaganda, like Liberty.Me and Students For Liberty is more like ” better the world” stuff.
I don’t believe there is a right answer, I like lots of competing answers, and users whom adopt the ones best suited to your own circumstance.
I also appreciate Youliy’s consistently high quality commentary.

By the way this article is one of the most brilliant pieces on libertarian strategy I’ve read to date. However, the enclave approach I believe is just one component of what is necessary to build a critical mass of libertarians in the world. It won’t work by itself. It can’t work by itself, for the reasons that Youliy Nicov describes above. We need a multiple angle approach that occurs fairly simultaneously. Not only do we need to produce results in an enclave, but we also need to build a growing coalition of allies on the outside. If we do not do this, we risk being destroyed due to not being left alone. Also, in constructing the enclaves, I recommend creating a powerful republic-type state that is essentially a “tyranny of liberty”, in order to ensure that it is both formidable, and the citizenry have no viable path towards increasing their own wealth or influence by advocating for expansion of the state. Democracy, nor anarchy can exist in any form should an enclave succeed, mostly because of political choice theory and the inevitability of anarchy gravitating toward centralization as people clamor for power. A “tyranny of liberty” is basically a super strong strict interpretation Constitution of sorts that maintains the state within way stricter limits than the American one, with a Guardianship of people that are autistically wedded to the ideas of liberty, so much so that the allure of social influence or monetary power will never corrupt them. This is how you create a situation of total liberty that will preserve the state of liberty you desire.

Next, outside the enclave what you should do is hammer repeatedly at what I call “the pillars of the state”. There are only a few, and if you devote all of your outside resources on repeatedly and effectively and unabashedly hammering them, you may be able to cripple the state’s ability to grow somewhat. One of its pillars is an easy to control democracy by virtue of a representative two-party system. If you make democracy more competitive by promoting different rules that govern its operation, you can slow their ability to absolutely control the discourse. Also hammer repeatedly at cable control by virtue of getting rip of broadcasting monopolies by virtue of the FCC. And the last pillar that is pretty key is to hammer at the base legitimacy of the public education system. If you can do these things, we may actually have a shot. But even then, it is a long shot. Anything else is a failed strategy from the get-go as already delineated by this article.

By the way this article is one of the most brilliant pieces on libertarian strategy I’ve read to date. However, the enclave approach I believe is just one component of what is necessary to build a critical mass of libertarians in the world. It won’t work by itself. It can’t work by itself, for the reasons that Youliy Nicov describes above. We need a multiple angle approach that occurs fairly simultaneously. Not only do we need to produce results in an enclave, but we also need to build a growing coalition of allies on the outside. If we do not do this, we risk being destroyed due to not being left alone. Also, in constructing the enclaves, I recommend creating a powerful republic-type state that is essentially a “tyranny of liberty”, in order to ensure that it is both formidable, and the citizenry have no viable path towards increasing their own wealth or influence by advocating for expansion of the state. Democracy, nor anarchy can exist in any form should an enclave succeed, mostly because of political choice theory and the inevitability of anarchy gravitating toward centralization as people clamor for power. A “tyranny of liberty” is basically a super strong strict interpretation Constitution of sorts that maintains the state within way stricter limits than the American one, with a Guardianship of people that are autistically wedded to the ideas of liberty, so much so that the allure of social influence or monetary power will never corrupt them. This is how you create a situation of total liberty that will preserve the state of liberty you desire.

Next, outside the enclave what you should do is hammer repeatedly at what I call “the pillars of the state”. There are only a few, and if you devote all of your outside resources on repeatedly and effectively and unabashedly hammering them, you may be able to cripple the state’s ability to grow somewhat. One of its pillars is an easy to control democracy by virtue of a representative two-party system. If you make democracy more competitive by promoting different rules that govern its operation, you can slow their ability to absolutely control the discourse. Also hammer repeatedly at cable control by virtue of getting rip of broadcasting monopolies by virtue of the FCC. And the last pillar that is pretty key is to hammer at the base legitimacy of the public education system. If you can do these things, we may actually have a shot. But even then, it is a long shot. Anything else is a failed strategy from the get-go as already delineated by this article.

Yeah, just imagine the free speech and economic laws if the Administration of Ivy League Harvard University were put in charge of things!!!!

The necessity of high IQ for a free or freer society is a hotly contested proposition, but there is no debate concerning the proposition as a sufficiency condition. Given that, and given the the fact that IQ is a statistical population sample measurement–meaning raising the intelligence level or education level of the population does not change the normal distribution of IQ–it should be evident to most that it is a rather sterile avenue for inquiry.

At best, one might might proffer that you would simply end with more clever logical fallacies to justify discretionary authority over overs, noting intelligence, like reason, is a thing that more often applies to means, not ends(in this case, simply more clever arguments for the same old shit). It worst, some and perhaps most, might view it as a proxy argument for race as a necessity for a freer society, hence justifying some of the more vile aspects of the early progressive movement, things like eugenics, immigration control, drug laws…laws that still have profound negative consequences today.

Finally, it should be noted that IQ itself is a progressive invention, a thing concocted during that time to give scientific merit to the eugenics movement(scientific racism).

Well done Michael! This is Free Market Anarchist Jack (as Every Man and of All Trades).

I have with increasing chagrin over the past few years watched Stefan mutate from a true Free Market Anarchist to the Trumped up liberated Libertarian or whatever he now might be called. It is worth a psycho-historical analysis of his personal changes, so I hope someone (maybe me) will do this. I agree with the tenor of your article on creating alternatives to what I term the “Iron Cage” of initiated physical violence of governments as my quotes below indicate. These anarchist non-political alternatives I wish to see created, I poetically term “Heartland Homes”–and I believe these can be lovingly liberated within the larger Penitentiary. This is what I have been trying to do for the past ten years or so and will take up in earnest fun in my move to the New Land of Zeal for Liberty, aka, New Zeal Land of Liberty, along with Ben Franklin, “Where liberty dwells, there is my country.”

I want to start up an Anarchist Community wherever there (landing in Auckland, this Nov 27) including a Co-housing Mutual Care Community based sharing the 4 Virtues of Responsible Freedom: 1.No initiated physical force 2.Private property 3.Free trade 4.Contractual agreement. These are all humans require to create and maintain social order. All interested please email me: themesofjack@gmail.com Hope to see you Zealously pursuing Responsible Freedom there!

Cheers, Jack as Every Man now in Santiago, Chile ☺

“He who is unaware of his ignorance, will only be misled by his knowledge.” Richard Whately

“You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller

“We can create the conditions in which complex organisms will arrange themselves.” F.A. Hayek

“Ask not what is inside your head, rather, ask what your head is inside of.” J.J. Gibson

“The most radical source of inequalities in human societies is the ‘ruler-ruled’ relationship. The fashioning of a truly free world depends upon building the fundamental infrastructures that enable different peoples to become self-governing.” Vincent Ostrom

“Governments must not be abolished! They must be abandoned. They will be abandoned when you demonstrate that you can manage your affairs without the supervision of a pater familias. In short, when you abandon your political adolescence and come of age, you will stop seeking to impose your will upon others, and at the same time demonstrate that your will is strong enough to control your own actions within a framework of non-molestation.” Robert LeFevre

2. Why would the strategy of spreading ideas work, if people can’t understand the ideas?

3. How can one understand it, if one isn’t literate or intelligent enough? How can there be shared values or agreement on social and political questions, if there are AGGREGATE racial disparities in intelligence?

4. Is there an unacknowledged biological barrier to the spread of libertarianism?

When half the world both illiterate and has an IQ under 100, and libertarianism REQUIRES highly literate people to handle its obscure language and its never-ending line of books and articles that try to sharpen its arguments to perfection, the critique holds water. Many alt-right people were former libertarians and objectivists that simply saw this and moved on.

Libertarianism is a leaky bucket falling into racialism, but it is not so astounding when you realize the racial perspective was largely ignored in philosophy. Philosophy omits biology. That’s the fatal flaw. A “back to race” movement, such as the alt-right, can leap to power with Trump in almost no-time because it resonates with people and is EASY to communicate. Horses + Donkeys = Mules. You have to keep the donkeys out of the horse barn or else you lose horse-racing. Likewise, you have to keep Europe white European or else you lose European civilization. Europe is not the African’s or Arab’s history. They don’t care for it, appreciate it, honor it, and won’t preserve it judging from what goes on in college campuses. Unless libertarianism finds an answer to that type of argument, it’s a post-libertarian world.

I always wondered what special something Hitler had to attain power in twelve years, whereas libertarianism has failed to attain power for 50 years. You could cop out and say, “well, power is not the point.” You still need power to dissolve power. You need a philosophy for living on earth WITH streets-smarts, and a philosophy that omits race misses a lot of how the world works.

I really like the overarching goal of: figure out how libertarians can start using status-quo bias and osmotic absorption of political norms to create more libertarians just like the state uses this phenomena to create implicit-statists.

And what better way to buck political norms than through humor? AKA: I believe my sarcastic responses to all things statist have finally found their calling. Lowest form of wit, easiest way to discredit anyone.

IQ is too often confoosed with academe — or, to be more general, formal education.

One of my favorite novels is Ken Follett’s “The Pillars of the Earth”. I’ll spend hours meditating how a totally illiterate but brilliant builder possessed the capacity to envision, map out and build a gigantic, superbly engineered and structurally sound cathedral by using basic common sense. Seems the novel spanned over 100 years to completion of the structure, and two or three generations. His illiteracy was not due to laziness or failure to study. It was due to lack of availability of academic tools in the 12th century. Time, place and circumstance.

My primary objection to Molyneux’s libertarian video is his inclination to lump all individuals espousing liberty into one “libertarian” basket — carrying out his argument from that collectivist point of view. “…Libertarians think this. Libertarians do that…” But I agree with the thrust of his presentation.

If you are truly libertarian, you and I probably have developed some starkly different ideas and concepts pertaining to liberty. I’d say this is normal for genuine freedom of thought and expression. Most participants on this forum have grown up and been educated under the heavy hand of the state. To realistically envision total freedom and anarchy is a task to behold. But what Molyneux emphasizes pertaining to bringing the values we treasure to life seems in good taste to me.

“When half the world both illiterate and has an IQ under 100, and libertarianism REQUIRES highly literate people to handle its obscure language and its never-ending line of books and articles that try to sharpen its arguments to perfection, the critique holds water. Many alt-right people were former libertarians and objectivists that simply saw this and moved on.”

“You have to keep the donkeys out of the horse barn or else you lose horse-racing. Likewise, you have to keep Europe white European or else you lose European civilization. Europe is not the African’s or Arab’s history. They don’t care for it, appreciate it, honor it, and won’t preserve it judging from what goes on in college campuses.”

“I always wondered what special something Hitler had to attain power in twelve years, whereas libertarianism has failed to attain power for 50 years. You could cop out and say, “well, power is not the point.” You still need power to dissolve power. ”

KKK meetings, skinhead rallies, white power congregations, nazi marches never struck me as a font of perspicacious intellectualism nor as thing motivated by power as means to simply dissolve power. And I would be remiss not to remind readers it was white european christians who put the jews in the ovens…not the muslims, not the arabs. This school boy Nazi/Hitler crap I’m reading here is a noxious type of codswallop that can only be the product of mind predominantly “educated” by the virulent identity victimhood politics of the right-wing noise machine.

“Judging what goes on college campuses” is usually a judgement reserved for those of who of the age to be actually enrolled on a college campus. I tend to discount the ruminations of those who are a generation or more removed from that environment, noting that older generations holding the younger generations to be going straight to hell in a hand basket is a viewpoint that has been held from time immemorial. To the extent there is fire behind the smoke(and I’m sure there is), it should be noted that those at the fore of this are not muslims, arabs, brown people…no, the ones at the fore of identity politics nonsense are middle class white students. Typically pointing finders at other middle class white students..by and large, white people accusing other white people of white privilege or white emasculation. LOL.

Communitarian privilege theory, PM critical theory, etc are theories largely concocted by white europeans. It originates more or less from the same place that spawned Hitler…Germany. It is NOT a thing imported in from the “brown people continents.” The biggest threat to liberal western civilization is the cornucopia of crappy ideas that are largely “home grown.”

I believe you’ve failed to achieve your goal; instead of rebutting Stefan, I believe you’ve unwittingly bolstered his argument. Lets begin with how you hope to create such a libertarian enclave: you hope to have like-minded individuals, people whom have been convinced already, to join such a society. I don’t know where you’re from, but I doubt you’re from a libertarian enclave of sort you envision. Who convinced you to become a libertarian? Unless you want to claim you spontaneously became a libertarian with no idea what that was, which wouldn’t make any actual sense, you were likely convinced from a variety of sources – books, articles, and other libertarians making arguments. How did these other like-minded individuals become libertarians? It probably wasn’t osmosis, as the world, as it stands today, is ruled by statism. Still, you want to create an enclave of like-minded individuals to then churn out more libertarians to grow such an enclave. Your answer to this convince people, if they realize it or not, that a libertarian society is the correct way for society to exist as other societies do their own. As stated before, this is still an example of convincing people, and it’s with the hope that this feeling will not slowly erode. Somewhat ironically, you cite the millions of statists produced by the state’s education systems in the United States. This is your plan; you want to churn out libertarians. When the state does this, it’s known as indoctrination. Regardless of a family or society’s ideology, if they’re teaching children a certain ideology from a young age to early adulthood, that’s still indoctrination. Yet people don’t reference such acts as indoctrination when they agree with it. This is notably seen in the United States with Marxism that is taught in public schools.

Now of the projects with any sort of real chance behind them designed to create a libertarian society, they’re largely manned by: individuals with high IQs . Considering the libertarian enclaves that people are working on are being pushed by libertarians with high IQs, it appears reasonable to see that the start to your libertarian osmosis machine requires high IQ individuals to get it started. Those individuals were themselves convinced at one point or another despite the existence of the state and their biases (or maybe partly due to their biases they’re pursuing such a course). Seeing as Stefan claimed it would take high IQ individuals to create such a society and that people would need to be convinced, you’re supporting his argument. Unless you wish to hold that position that those behind the Seasteading Institute, the attempts to build the economic zone in places like Honduras and other libertarian themed endeavors do not have high IQs, I suggest that you concede your position. To get where you want to go, you’re relying on convincing people and relying on the work done by individuals with high IQs and thus supporting Stefan’s argument.